devtrackers.gg
Twitch Vod | Youtube Vod | Rare Item Tokens Update
Full Player Avatar Refresh Album
Jagex Team
Mod Warden - Executive Producer
- Had COVID in December and it was a primary reason why there was no Leads Q&A.
Mod Iroh - Art Director
- Joined Jagex 5-6 months ago.
- Was an illustrator for 10 years and joined the game's industry in the late 90s.
- "MMOs are the most fun, you build the world and have adventures in it and I wanted to work on one. And there's not really a better one than Runescape."
Mod Stead - Associate Art Director
- Joined in 2007 back when they were converting the game to full screen.
- Last bit of art produced for release was for Prifddinas (the slayer dungeon).
- Favorite piece was the Abbey for One Piercing Note.
Avatar Refresh Initiative
EVERYTHING SHOWN BELOW IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND IS NOT FINAL!
- The Avatar Refresh is a key initiative for the year.
- We are giving you an inside look on the development process, the aims, plans, and challenges we are facing.
- No release date will be provided until we can commit to one.
- We will regularly share our progress with the community.
Introduction
Why Now?
If this is the biggest appeal of your game why would you not commercially/artistically want it to be the best it can be.
- Both the community and members on the team have been wanting it.
- The improvements we've made on the engine/tech side have allowed us to take it on.
- The avatar has lacked detail/fidelity and it's important since users experience a bond with it.
- Fundamentally, we will take the mesh and the texture assets contained in the character and do a visual refresh.
- The characters will remain the same at their heart, but they will evolve in fidelity, detail, and mood.
- This will act as a foundation to build upon, an evolutionary step in line with Runescape's history
- Anything else would require a significant change in direction with game engine implications.
- We are working under the constraints of geometry, character meshes, etc...
- Delivering something concrete that works in-game then unlocks the possibility to do other stuff.
Character Creation - First Area of Attack
- There's a lot we want to do, but we are being very pragmatic to prove things out early and not risk things.
- Character creation delivers the most value as it something players interact with very early on.
- It is something we can tackle without bending a lot of technology and it provides immediate value.
- We can utilize data to determine the most used outfits to determine a starting point.
- We are constantly listening to player feedback from all sources.
- For this project there will be a long period where feedback is possible to provide and be gathered.
Production Milestones
Preparation | Ideation | Proof of Concept | Production | Delivery
- Preparation began back in 2018 with focus groups, technology investigations, and capacity planning.
- Ideation process is seen in the process, sculpts, and concepts of the body, hair, and the costumes.
- Proof of Concept is currently taking place and where we build things to see if everything holds up.
- Production/Delivery will require us to work with external partners and improve tech to build everything.
- 16x Male Outfits, 16x Female Outfits, 62x Hairstyles, 18x Facial Hairs
Avatar
-
Kit Parts: Hair, Head, Jaw (male only), Torso/Arms, Hands, Legs, Feet.
- The mail jaw is a separate part in order to apply facial hair.
-
Geometry: Complexity of the mesh is reasonable but not ideal for animation/deformation.
-
UVWs: Taking flat stuff (textures) to fit on a 3D object (player model).
-
Textures: The appearance of a model.
-
Vertex Colours
: That geometry is laid out in a funny way allowing us to break up the model in different ways.
- We can apply something called polygon colors, information stored on the vertices that make up the mesh.
- Allows us to put shading on the character cheaply at the cost of it being fixed in place with a complex mesh.
-
Labels
: Explain what goes on under the skin so you can animate it.
- It's typical you have something that looks like a bone when you mock it up in most engines. In our engine we mark up the surface the model and it tells it to imagine there's a bone underneath and then you animate it.
Chathead
: Separate model marked up in a separate way.
-
If we can prove we can get things in that look/work better and we don't break anything, it gives us courage to remove some of the difficult things in the pipeline. Future ambition is definitely to move to a more flexible animation system.
- Player/NPCs run on two different animation systems with the NPC being a more standard system.
Preparation/Ideation - Body
Golden Truth: No one gets anything right the first time.
Cut-off points for slots - There's more cuts than this is a simplified version.
Z-Brush Models - Right Male/Female models (Current) | Left Male/Female is the models (New)
- Z-brush is a clay sculpting program and the models don't reflect the current model in-game.
Models - Feedback Loop
- The proportions are an underlying foundation we can't move from, but they are in a good place.
- The core process: Get reference, understand your audience, combination of modeling/concept/paints overs.
- One of our character artist put a lot of initial groundwork into modeling the characters.
- We started looking at research, feeding in focus group feedback, and iterated on this models.
- These iterations are shared in live channels for feedback and then improved.
- The body is the foundation for everything and has to be in place before we do the clothing or hair.
Feedback Points
We're trying to build an adventurer for our world and we want one who is athletic and fit to take on the world.
- Models - Match current proportions but flesh out the detail and make it more elegant and balanced.
- Female Model (Current) - Lack of geometry in the arm isn't subtle and causes internal break up in the form.
- Players have noted they want an athletic character and the current feels too top heavy.
- Polygon Shading - Was sensible in the past, but it means you don't get much subtly in the lighting.
- We want the light to bounce off them and for it to be enjoyable traveling.
Preparation/Ideation - Hair
We want every part of this [project] to be it's best self.
- Started with this hair style as it has a fair amount of volume and starts to get some flow to it.
- Main Differences:
- Old - Polygonal and use triangles to try and get its shape.
- New - Hair has more flow, varied, and organic.
- The refresh is trying to keep the spirit rather than incorporate a complete change.
Hair Flexibility - Side Project
- Currently the head/facial hair is tied to each gender, and we want to break away from that in the future.
- The technology isn't built to let this happen but it could in the future.
- We are picking it up on some side experiments, but it's not what we plan to deliver in the end.
- Starts with a lot of research/reference boards with hair styles that had volumes/flows that felt recognizable.
- After selecting a hairstyle with a certain volume/feel, if we don't have much info we find real world references.
- Using the hairstyle's silhouette we identify shapes and flows that exist in real hairstyles.
- We need to understand it and be able to explain it, otherwise we can't scale the effort later on.
- We then sculpt it out, add more line overs, more feedback, and continue to iterate on it.
- The more iteration loops the higher the quality.
Preparation/Ideation - Costumes
One of the reasons I was keen on working on Runescape is the costume design. I feel we are only scratching the surface and we could do so much more.
Process
- The Black Smith starter costume is the one we picked for our walkthrough for proving our the process.
- There was a lot of research to go from the current version to the newer version.
- People want to be respectful of their experience, so even if there's humor, there's an underlying seriousness.
- We focused area by area, respecting what's there and try to make it more balanced for both male/female models.
- A huge amount of detail goes into each part, even if it's a refresh. This is why there needs to be a narrow scope.
Black Smith Starter Outfit - Example
- There's more detail, form, elegance, and a stronger sense of construction.
- The pieces fix to the character rather than appearing sprayed on. Everything has a logic to it.
- There's belts/straps holding everything together.
- We don't want a crazy amount of detail that hurts your eyes, but for you to see an underlying form of construction.
- The meshes aren't widely different but they are a different construction.
- The new one has more geometry and is laid out more evenly.
- We can take details for a very detail sculpt, turn it into textures and put it on a more regular and order mesh.
- It gives us something that deforms better, has a better silhouette, and takes light much better.
Proof of Concept - In-game
- The weird animations are called ranger? movement animations which test if the models animate well.
- This is trying to prove it can be delivered and works in the engine without breaking.
- We test everything as soon as we can.
Check List
- Refresh character so it's running on our existing tech, and delivering the same content in the character creator.
- Make sure it works piece by piece with the old and new working together.
- Make the interaction with the world more rewarding.
- The avatar is rooted in the world because of the warm light of the fire as well as the cooler shadow side.
- You are seeing the folds folds on the avatar/outfit and there's a real sense of detail in all the areas.
- Movement between light sources gives you a more rewarding form and you get a sense of direction lighting.
You got two really big components, there's the world you explore in and there's yourself. For it to be rewarding you want a sense of interaction between that world and the avatar. The avatar is not just not prettyless or beauty or detail or all of that. The avatar is the thing that pegs you to the world. The more we can do to make that as rewarding, the better it is.
- Mod Iroh